Heroes and Villains

If one was to ask me why, at its core, the Alt-Right failed as spectacularly as it did, I would answer that it was the obsession with playing a villain for the media, i.e. the tendency for Alt-Right figures to hype up the elements of the movement that were sure to get the goat of the mainstream the quickest. The conventional thinking, at that time, was that these theatrics would make the movement seem cool and bring in more people, especially young people. But, it turned out to backfire, badly, and the reason for this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how most people view villains in real life versus in the movies.

It is true, as many Alt-Right figures claimed, that people love villains. Look how popular characters like Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter are, not to mention someone like Freddy Krueger. I went as Darth Vader for Halloween several times as a child, Hannibal Lecter is fascinating because of how cultured he is, and Freddy Kruger makes tons of stupid/funny Schwarzenegger puns. Trust me, if you weren’t around in the late 80s and early 90s, the amount of Freddy Kruger related merchandise was pretty staggering. Here is the thing though, most people only like these characters because they are fictional, as they allow people to tap into their dark side.

If he was real, Darth Vader would be an evil tyrant, one that murdered children and betrayed his friends and family. That Hannibal Lecter is a cannibal would far outweigh his ability to cook or quote Roman poetry, at least in the minds of the vast majority of people. And, a real Freddy Kruger? Freddy Kruger is a child murderer and implied child molester (that one was never explicitly stated in the original series, though most everyone just assumed that he was). If he were real, we would be hard pressed to find a jury that would actually convict parents for burning him alive, after he was let off scott-free thanks to a technicality. When you try to play the villain, you aren’t in a movie where fiction gives you a protective barrier, you are in the real world where villains aren’t actually “cool” or popular.

Richard Spencer is a fantastic example of why this mentality failed. He had a good CV and was the editor of The American Conservative, which had a lot of credibility as one of the few magazines on the Right that didn’t cheer on the idiotic war in Iraq. He could have soft peddled nationalist politics and slowly changed the conversation. Instead, he went with the “more extreme than thou” mentality, got canned, and ended up playing a Bond villain for the media. He wanted to be the bad guy, but he failed to understand that as soon as he stepped into their ring, the media controlled the narrative. Because it was real life and not a movie, he wouldn’t be the cool rebel, instead he was cast as a monster – not so much Darth Vader, but more akin to Eastasia, which we have always been at war with (Eurasia fits him, too).

And to make matters worse, far too many in the Alt-Right decided to not only make themselves the “bad guys,” but rather the most despicable villains in modernity’s rogues’ gallery: the Nazis. Nazis have long been a staple in American movies, even going back to the 1950s and 1960s. Those movie audiences, after all, were full of World War II veterans and their children, and everyone wants to believe their side (and their fathers) were fundamentally just. The core of this attitude wasn’t anti-racism, practically everyone from that time period would be considered “racist” by today’s standards, but more the idea that they (the Nazis) were opposing our people in a worldwide conflict.

Go back and look at the World War II films made from the 1950s until the early 1970s. There isn’t much of a discussion about racism or the Holocaust in The Dirty Dozen or Kelly’s Heroes, the single-minded obsession with that didn’t really go full throttle until the 1990s. But most Americans, including rightwing, red-blooded anti-communists, hated the Nazis all the same. If my grandfather ever saw me parading down the street acting like a damn fool in a Nazi uniform, he would be furious. Not because of the Holocaust, but because the Nazis killed a lot of his friends. And, my daddy grew up hearing about those boys that didn’t make it home – good, hard working, Christian men who never got a chance to get married and have children because of a German soldier. He isn’t going to forget that.

For most people, villains are only cool when they’re imaginary because there is the safety of fantasy. It allows people to explore some of their darker side, without any real life consequences. Think of it as a roller coaster. Sure, roller coasters are fun when the safety mechanisms are in place. Take those safety mechanisms away and it becomes significantly less fun. Plus, even if folks do cheer for the villain, mostly ironically or for a laugh, they cheer even harder when the hero defeats the villain. So, even if it was possible for you to be a kickass Dark Lord of the Sith, you have still set yourself up as the antagonist that most people want to see defeated. And, that is the best you can hope for – the villain the people like, but love to see beaten. A far more likely scenario is just to be the hated pariah.

I understand why the Alt-Right did this. The media loves to paint anyone to the right of Lindsey Graham as the new Hitler; and the Alt-Right, largely growing up in a media landscape saturated with images of “cool” villains, embraced the roll/troll. But by embracing that roll, the Alt-Right also embraced the media’s narrative about them, making it infinitely easier for the media to convince the public that every thoughtcriminal on social media was the next Josef Mengele. The solution is to create, or own, narratives. Remember, the media is not actually all that trusted, so when they label someone a Nazi, a lot of people are skeptical. But when you respond with “yeah, I’m a Nazi and Hitler did nothing wrong!” then most people will just assume a blind squirrel found a nut.

Yes, the Left will call you a Nazi anyway, but the fact that it’s so greatly overused is finally taking away its power, calling yourself a Nazi causes that skepticism to go right out the window. As RamZPaul pointed out, feminists also overuse the term “rapist,” do you want to go around and call yourself a rapist, let alone actually be one? Doing so would certainly help you play the part of a villain, but it would also drive away any person with a semi-functional moral compass.  

By the standards of any sane society, we are not villains, so why do we let ourselves be defined by a fundamentally insane, sick society? Yeah, I get playing a villain can be fun and it certainly is easier to troll, but at what cost? At the cost of alienating the very people we need on our side? What started out as fun and games, and something to irk the Establishment, ended up hurting a lot of folks. And, it shouldn’t have. We can be the hero because that’s what we are. We don’t desire mass murder or chaos, but a decent place to raise a family. There is no reason to allow that goal to be compromised just so we can get our kicks from playing the “bad guys” on the internet.

-By Dixie Anon

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